Anna Hess dreamed about moving back to the land ever since her parents dragged her off their family farm at the age of eight. She worked as a field biologist and nonprofit organizer before acquiring fifty-eight acres and a husband, then quit her job to homestead full time. She admits that real farm life involves a lot more hard work than her childhood memories entailed, but the reality is much more fulfilling and she loves pigging out on sun-warmed strawberries and experimenting with no-till gardening, mushroom propagation, and chicken pasturing.

She also enjoys writing about the adventures, both on her blog at WaldenEffect.org, and in her books. Her first paperback, The Weekend Homesteader, helped thousands of homesteaders-to-be find ways to fit their dreams into the hours leftover from a full-time job. The Naturally Bug-Free garden, which suggests permaculture techniques of controlling pest invertebrates in the vegetable garden, is due out in spring 2015 from Skyhorse Publishing. In addition, a heaping handful of ebooks serve a similar purpose.